My colleague and I have set up and run Jenkins on a KVM guest running Ubuntu 12.04 with good results for a while now. We are thinking about deploying a cluster of Jenkins CI hosts in master/slave configuration, with the libvirt slave plugin<https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Libvirt+Slaves+Plugin> to keep our hardware count low.
Our environment is a strictly Linux environment (CentOS, Scientific Linux, Fedora, and Ubuntu). Both of us are competent in setting up large clusters. We typically use tools like cobbler + a configuration management tool (Puppet, Chef, and alike) to set up a large number of machines (physical and/or virtual) hands off (hundreds of nodes in less than an hour typical). We would like to do the same for nodes running Jenkins. But the step by step guide<https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Step+by+step+guide+to+set+up+master+and+slave+machines>doesn't give us any clues in this regard. *What we have done*: we have got a batch of nodes up with JDK and Jenkins already - all hands-off. But what we have done just covers the server provisioning + *preliminary* configuration. We still need to map out what to proceed next so that we can tie all Jenkins CI nodes together. Personally I don't mind configure the master via the Web UI (although I would love to automate this part if I have the necessary info). But being used to dealing with hundreds or more machines hands-off, clicking the UI for many machines just doesn't feel right. Can someone point to us a documentation that talks about how to set up large cluster of Jenkins CI hosts more in the hands-off way? Regards, --Zack
